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Speaking to US industry news service News.com, Chris DiBona, Google's manager for open-source said, 'We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better.' Although the remark sounds innocuous enough, Google often comes up with major new initiatives which start out as small development projects often with a foundation in open source.

OpenOffice is an open source productivity suite, which mirrors many of the applications such as spreadsheet, word processor, and database used in Microsoft's

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best selling Office. The organisation behind OpenOffice recently launched version 2.0 that uses the OASIS open document standard.

DiBona told News.com 'We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry.' The last phrase is likely to be interpreted by many analysts as evidence that Google intends to open another front in its battle with Microsoft.

Google has already made it clear that it is willing to help with open source projects. Earlier this year, Google and Sun Microsystems signed a deal to co-operate on various open source projects. Although it was not explicitly mentioned at the time, a prime candidate is Sun's own Star Office project.

Star Office is largely based on OpenOffice. Although Sun has been developing and promoting Star Office for some years, the backing and involvement of Google would certainly raise the profile and the interest in the program.